Tears Fall
by Fairy Tale Nerd
Summary: A somewhat dark retelling of sleeping beauty. One-shot. Please review!


A/N: This is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, a bit on the dark side, but a retelling nonetheless. It's written in second person as I was inspired by Bistre Melancholia's fanfic "Waiting." Hope you like it!

**Tears Fall**

Once upon a time, a witch cursed you, and you hated her for it. In your childhood, you could be happy. You would run and play, until eventually you would look back to your parents, smile lighting up your face, and see your mother's tears. Then you would stop and wish you could cry with her, but only be able to keep smiling in a feeble hope she could - and would - be comforted at its sight. See, you'd think, I don't mind. See, it doesn't make me sad. But you knew that was a lie. One day your life would end, to be wasted in a hundred year sleep, and that day was far too close.

The years wore on. The queen's tears stopped making you want to comfort her, and instead made you want to hate her. Always, if ever you were gleeful, tears would fall and cut your blissful moment short. By your fourteenth year, you learned to just not care. Never smile, never cry, never let anything faze you. The queen wouldn't cry, and you could try to forget your fate.

All the while the king pressured you to learn the ways of court, and more importantly to marry so that he could have an heir to the throne. Suitor after suitor were thrown your way, none of whom you truly cared for, and all were so much older. Soon, you grew desperate to escape the castle, your family, your fate. By fifteen and a half you started growing frantic. A law banning all spinning wheels in the kingdom was enacted by your parents at your urging. Slowly, you went mad, confining yourself to your room. Nothing had sharp corners, and everything was padded. What if, you thought, it's not just pricking your finger on a spindle? What if it's pricking your finger on anything at all?

Your father tried to coax you out for a while, still throwing suitors your way. If he can just marry you off to someone, anyone, there will be someone to take over the kingdom when he's gone and you still sleep. Though each suitor becomes older and more ludicrously chosen than the last, and in your maddened state you begin to grow lonely. You need someone to talk to, someone who can look at you without pity filling their eyes. And you start to wonder…

True love's kiss will wake you from your sleep. Once you wake, you won't be alone any longer. Better, your fate will be over with, no longer will you have to live in perpetual terror of all things sharp. The more you ponder the more you realize the absurdity of your fear. In slumber, you won't be aware of the passing time, you won't know that a hundred years has passed, won't feel every second ticking by. After all, a full night's sleep feels like only seconds. Dreams pass faster than reality.

One night, you get the nerve to creep up to the tallest tower. You pause before the door of the spinning room, the only place where sewing is still condoned. A deep breath is all it takes before the hesitation flees. Quickly, you grasp the handle and push open the door. Adrenaline rushes through your veins in anticipation of what is to come. Only a few more minutes until you sleep, and then in just as much time (it will seem) you will wake to a new world, and a better one at that.

The room is empty now, the spinners all gone home to rest their tired hands. The glint of moonlight off a spindle draws your attention, and you swiftly - yet carefully - snatch it up. Grinning softly, you nearly run back to your room. Lying down on your soft bed, you slide beneath the feather-stuffed quilt and smile softly. Your sixteenth birthday was today, you realize (it's so easy to lose track of time in solitude). A day imagined to be the end, when really it's just like any other day. At night you'll fall asleep, and then you'll awake, feeling only minutes have gone by.

Grinning, you bring the spindle to your finger, inhaling sharply at the prick but quickly your eyes snap shut, your muscles become rigid. Frightened, and still very much aware, you try to open your eyes but to no avail. They are as if sewn shut by the needle still grasped in your hands.

The needle! That's it! You just need to let it go. Perhaps the curse had not been intended to work this way. The needle was only supposed to prick your finger, meant to play a supporting role and nothing more. You try to move your fingers, to draw your hand away, but no matter how hard you wish it, your muscles will not work.

In horror, you want nothing more than to scream for help. Fear blots out every thought. Once again you are a child, crying for her mom. But your lips will not budge, won't open to let out your scream. They are frozen in a smile, frozen for a hundred years.

Defeated, you wish to cry, and are rewarded with a wetness upon your cheeks, but the tears can't dissolve the stitches binding your eyes, and they are left only to fall down your cheeks.

Your mind whirls about, searching for an idea, any idea at all, to get you out of this mess. For a long time, the only thought that comes is of moving the needle, but of course that won't work. Still, you're stuck on the idea, turning your would-be sleep into a waking nightmare. And then you realize that the curse merely put your body to rest, and your mind just has to follow.

So hard you try to sleep, but nothing helps. You think back to your childhood and try to imagine your mother singing you softly to a world of dreams. You think of the sheep you used to count and the lies you told yourself on the nights you didn't want to fall asleep in fear you'd never wake up. This night is no different, and if counting sheep could soothe you then, why not now?

And so you start. One sheep… two sheep… three sheep… a hundred sheep… they just keep jumping that fence, no end in sight. It brings you a small amount of comfort to know that the sheep will always be there ready to jump when you need them. Counting sheep becomes all you know. First, you lose awareness of the outside world. You don't notice when your lady's maid screams at your still form, when your mother cries at the sight of the needle in your unmovable hand. You only notice the fence and the endless sea of sheep.

Eventually, you start to forget things. Your name is the first to be lost to the one millionth sheep. Then your memories start to fade. By the third billion sheep nothing remains but the memory of that horrible moment on your bed when you couldn't move and felt so helpless. The knowledge of the curse still remains as well, but nothing else.

Then one day comes when you feel something odd, a tingling on your mouth. A muscle spasm you think briefly, continuing to count the sheep. But the memory of that last moment surfaces and you realize that such a thing could never have happened. It's never happened before, so why now? You lose count, but now you know that the curse has been broken. You think of opening your eyes, but it would take so much effort and your eyelids feel so heavy…

Finally, you fall asleep, your mind exhausted from the counting. You wake to the light of day streaming through your bedroom window. Your eyes finally blink open, adjusting slowly and painfully to the light. Mind groggy with sleep, it takes a minute before the horror comes, and you bolt upright, muscles screaming and burning with misuse. Where is your prince?

And you realize all over again that while you lost count he had kissed you, breaking the curse. But only your body had awoken, while your mind could finally rest. His princess still asleep, he must have slunk away, defeated by the burden of having traveled all this way, of having faced so many hardships, to find that he was not the true love of which the legend spoke.

And so you awoke, more alone than ever; a Little Bo Peep who had lost her sheep.

A/N: Though it may seem unlikely that she ever reached three billion sheep, I did the math to make sure the numbers were accurate. Assuming the hundred years are completely fulfilled down to the second, she counted one sheep every second, and the hundred years didn't officially start until she started counting, by the end she would have counted 3,155,760,000 sheep. Thank gosh for calculators.


End file.
